A job I had intermittently while in college was as a Transportation Construction Inspector for the NYSDOT. I reported to the Engineer in Charge and we performed several duties (concrete pot test for water content, asphalt temp check as it arrived, surveying, etc.) but in summary, we babysat the contractor company staff hired to do roadwork by the state. The sites I worked were in upstate NY, usually in the sticks. (Blog image for interest was taken many years later in Harlem.) Up south as my Dad would call it. As such we interacted with some interesting folks. Some who say I was the first African American they had interacted with…
Lucky me.
Trust that I have many unpleasant stories that I will not share here. Except one. This post reminded me of one young woman who thought it was a great idea to share a wildly racist belief her grandmother held with me amongst others. Will spare you the particulars but it involved a diminished understanding of physiology as it pertains to cognitive capabilities, especially regarding African Americans. And I am sure you can work out that this “belief” did not fall in my favor.
I did not react. I hope she did not think this would surprise or upset me. I was trained in the dojo of a bigoted upstate NY school system. I had heard it all many times by this point. Kept my usual flat affect, turned to her and stated:
Ah. What you are telling me is that your grandmother is ignorant.
She actually tried to be offended. Please. Faux offense and mock outrage are level 1 in this dojo.
I replied:
You must have misunderstood me. What I said was that she was ignorant, not stupid. I was not questioning her intellectual capabilities. I have no way of assessing that. Just saying that she is wildly misinformed.
Then I walked away.
She was as free to be upset as I was in not having a single care what she or her grandmother thought.
-ELW
Eric L. Woods 